On Stage

...She has hired Lloyd Dallas (Brian Murray), a Shakespearean actor from London, to stage the masterpiece...

...Opposite her in the difficult part of Norman is Peter Friedman, and the scenes between the two of them are worth getting lost later—as is inevitable without any properly marked exits—in Lincoln Center's underground garage...

...Dotty Otley (Loudon) is an aging, awful actress who has the starring role in a play called Nothing On because she took her meager savings and invested them in forming a touring troupe...

...He and Helen not only dance, they rent a place together...

...When she believes she is expecting, however, she cannot be sure the child is his...

...Indeed, Noises Off is the funniest show on Broadway...

...What is more, in 1914, it was untouched, since the first German air attacks on England (by zeppelins) occurred in January 1915...

...I never felt prepared, however, for the somber ending, which can be viewed as either deeply mystical or willfully obscure...

...The time of Heartbreak House—unchanged by the director, according to the Playbill— is 1914...

...Marjorie Bradley Kellogg should receive a medal for managing to introduce a sense of scenery to that awkward pie plate where the Circle in the Square feels compelled to fight a permanent battle to defend its conception of a theater without a proscenium stage...

...They are always funny, but not always in the way they should be...

...On Stage AMERICANS DO THE BRITISH BY LEO SAUVAGE Still playing in London after almost two years, Noises Off, Michael Frayn's farce, is sure to have the American public roaring at the Brooks Atkinson Theater for at least that long...

...Of course, it is a shambles...

...Other appropriately knotty envies and jealousies entangle the young leading man (Victor Garber), a couple of company members who call themselves Belinda Blair (Linda Thorson) and Frederick Fellowes (Paxton Whitehead), and the stagehand Tim Allgood (Jim Piddock...

...Though bombs are falling and people are running into shelters, we do not see anybody getting killed...

...As in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, the story is narrated by one of the clan members—Helen Stott, elder sister of Joyce and daughter of George and Peggy...

...Farcical characters are amusing precisely because they don't realize they are...

...Helen knows now she can dance when she wants to, she can love and be loved...

...Its premiere production is the pleasantly unexperimental and a Nightingale Sang..., one of 70 plays written by C.P, Taylor before his death in December 1981...

...Michael Blakemore, who directed on both sides of the Atlantic, definitely knows how to mount a piece in this genre— that is, how to put into effect the meticulous engineering required to achieve orderly chaos...

...As Hesione Hushabye and Ariadne Utterword, respectively, Rosemary Harris and Dana Ivey generate a lot of atmosphere...

...Yet another Briton, Taylor was introduced to Broadway in 1982 with the presentation of his somewhat pretentious Good...

...Both plays come to a fitting conclusion when the curtain refuses to close...

...In fact, the drama remains amazingly peaceful...

...Unfortunately, despite Blakemore's best efforts, the actors often tamper with it...

...It certainly does no harm either that her legs are pleasant to look at, and that she has a talent for creating an utter vacuum in her eyes and voice...

...Her Brooke keeps rigidly, and hilariously, to the instructions Dallas has given her—a la Chaplin in Modern Times tightening the bolts on the assembly line long after there is no assembly and no line...

...The play at the Newhouse is much more modest, and better...

...In addition, whatever Shaw and/or Page wanted Hesione's arm and hand movements to indicate, Harris overdoes it...

...But more important than the script is the appearance on the New York scene of Joan Allen, a remarkably talented young actress who, like Kinney, comes from the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago...

...But Helen resembles Williams' restless Tom Wingfield less than she does his sister Laura...

...No despair here either...

...The real story is Helen's...

...Not that this becomes a major problem: Perhaps thanks to her mother's prayers, Joyce is not pregnant after all...

...Several months after the Vivian Beaumont Theater was reopened with Peter Brook's intriguing and perplexing conception of Carmen, the small Mitzi Newhouse Theater located in its basement has been taken out of the dark, too...

...This is a wise and witty play, maybe Shaw's wisest and wittiest...

...It follows the lives of the Stotts, an ordinary if not exactly average family in Taylor' s hometown, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, during World War II...

...Thus the farce keeps ticking even after it's over...

...As for the other Stotts, Peggy is devoted to church, particularly to funerals...

...Of the two approaches, I confess I prefer the original overblown darkness...

...If Shaw perhaps had a prophetic vision of World War II, he certainly couldn't have foreseen "the day after," as Page seems willing to suggest...

...Grumbling and growling into his beard as the octogenarian Captain, Rex Harrison has the time of his life, and so do we when we can catch what he says...

...Moreover, in contrast to slapstick, farce has no room for improvisation...

...It's an optimistic play, tenderly and intelligently directed by Terry Kinney...

...Michael Annals' imaginative reversible setting, with its myriad nooks and doors, helps create the proper ambience...

...he hated war more than ever...

...She, too, lacks self-confidence and feels ugly because she limps, then learns to dance when a gentleman caller appears to show her how...

...The term slapstick is derived from the weapons the clowns in the Italian commedia dell'arte used to pummel each other...

...The new American production directed by Anthony Page at The Circle in the Square deals with the ambiguity by flooding Shaw's shadows with light, making the apocalyptic closing transparent...

...Whether it is always the right kind is another matter...

...Many critics have made the same mistake, describing Noises Off as a "slapstick" comedy...

...George, a retired miner, plays the piano and has a song for every circumstance...

...Joyce is going to marry Eric, now a soldier...

...A British work in a rather different vein is George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House...

...Loudon, after correctly playing the scene where she is tormented by the phone and the sardines, also disrupts the rhythm with a good deal of clowning...

...His personal life becomes complicated by simultaneous involvements with Brooke Ashton (Deborah Rush), the sexy ingenue who wears black stockings mNoth-ing On, and Poppy Norton-Taylor (Amy Wright), his less attractive albeit equally amorous stage manager...

...The commendable exception is Rush...

...Page does little service by compounding the desolation in this case with a few physical details of his own, like the sound of jets and falling bombs...

...Even when we can't, he's a delight to watch...

...In Act One of Noises Off the ensemble tries to complete the dress rehearsal of the first act of Nothing On, scheduled to open that night, January 14, at the Grand Theatre of Weston-super-Mare...

...I liked Amy Irving as Ellie Dunn, the sweet little girl who doesn't intend to let her heart stay broken in that house...

...He soon runs into creative problems with his employer, who has trouble remembering what to do with a telephone, a newspaper and a plate of sardines while on stage...

...Stockton-on-Tees will probably never see the end of Nothing On, and we are supplied with no denouement for Noises Off...

...Act Two takes place backstage at Goole's Theatre Royal on February 13...

...Page obviously intends to render the tragedy more contemporary...

...By 1919, when it was published although not yet produced, Shaw knew what all the bloodshed had come to...

...The difference is that Helen, played by Joan Allen with an at once wry and highly winning simplicity that the author's frequent lapses into cuteness leave untouched, is not a mental case...

...The slightest movement made at the wrong time or place distorts the humor and warps the progression...

...All true evolutions of the form are symbolically, if not actually, accompanied by a continuous boister-ousness...

...Nevertheless, Sussex was not among the areas devastated by the conflict...

...Few would disagree with George Jean Nathan, who said of Shaw that he applied an "impudent intelligence" to such subjects as women or money, and it is difficult not to wonder how that quality could veer almost without warning into a philosophy of despair...

...Act III of Noises Off depicts the first act of NothingOn, too, onlythistimewe see it from the audience of the Municipal Theater of Stockton-on-Tees...

...she gives him up only when she learns he has a child...

...One day Eric arrives at the Stotts' with Norman, another soldier on leave...

...Norman's marriage does not inhibit the young woman...

...It is merely to observe that, with one exception, the members of the cast all break their discipline at some point...

...Rounding out the crew is Selsdon Mowbray (Douglas Seale), the white-haired "character actor" who is supposed to play a burglar if he can ever tear himself away from his bottle...

...Seale's performance is pure burlesque...

...Without denigrating this great American tradition— whose superior practitioners have ranged from the likes of John Brougham in the 1850s to Bert Lahr some 100 years later—one should note that most of the plays by British writers such as Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton (The Philanthropist) and Frayn are not related to it, even by marriage...

...Nevertheless, I can't help recalling the French production of Frayn's work staged by Robert Dhery, the creator of La Plume de ma Tante, with Colette Brosset in the part Dorothy Loudon plays in this country...

...The British play is not really more at home in Paris than New York, but there does appear to be a somewhat blurred perception among actors here of the distinction between a European farce and American burlesque...

...That is not the case with farce...

...The same first act of Nothing On is now being performed out front, yet Dotty Otley's players are more interested in what is happening between themselves as they wait for their cues...

...Philip Bosco, as Boss Mangan, is very good in his sarcastically Shavian lecture on the technicalities of handling money...

...the place Captain Shotover's house "in the hilly country on the north edge of Sussex, England.'' Shaw started writing the play on the eve of World War I, and finished it while the fighting was still raging...

...None of this is to suggest that the Broadway version of Frayn's latest work doesn't tick like a good Swiss watch, impeccably assembling and enmeshing the incongruous "noises" that originate "off' in the wings and reverberate on stage whenever the third-class road company it concerns tries to put on a fourth-class play in some pompously named theater in the English countryside...